Determine How You Will Retrieve the Documents

Finally, you must define the information users will use to search for the documents they want. Remember, this is data your content management system users will have on hand to use to search for the documents they want to retrieve. This is generally a subset of the variable data published on the documents. Here are some examples:

• Customer/account number or ID
• Customer name
• Date of issue
• Telephone number
• Postal code

This data is called metadata, meaning data about your data — in this case, data about your documents. It must be saved into a database table which you customize, so it can be read directly from there by the Documaker Source. Writing these database records is done by a Document Automation Language (DAL) script, which you create. Each row in the table represents a document to be archived and contains the metadata by which it will be indexed in the content management system.

To design the target layout for your metadata, you need to understand the options available in your content management system for placement of this data. This also helps you understand how to configure Documaker Connector for your destination content management system, since the options available in each system influence the way the destination is configured and how the data coming out of Documaker is mapped.

For example, some content management systems keep all the metadata together with the documents themselves and store documents in a rather flat structure. Other systems let you create one or more levels of folders to collect and organize documents for the users. These folders can have metadata attached to them (sometimes called properties) in some systems which may or may not be the same as the document metadata. Depending on the destination system, you can map your metadata to document or folder attributes, or some other container or object in your content management system.